1. Chapter 1 - Eisner
Where are we heading?

2. The educational imagination
The process of education always occurs within a context and decisions about educational practices need to be sensitive to that context.

3. Some items to ponder
How does one make valid comparisons among students in programs that differ in content and in aims?
Is a common standardized curriculum appropriate for a nation with 45 million students attending 110,000 schools in which 2 ½ million teachers work?
Is it fair to hold teachers and students accountable for achieving common outcomes in the face of such ‘savage inequalities’?

4. Policy
Policymakers themselves often do not see and therefore do not know the people their policies affect.

5. Thorndike
His work represented a vision of what he believed a science of behavior could do for the realization of social ambitions.
Behavior is controllable
Behavior can be shaped by method
Philosophically compatible with the scientific management of human behavior

6. Dewey
Growth was not the result of a set of externally reinforcing agents that Thorndike had described, but rather the outcome of an effort by the child to convert what Dewey called an indeterminate situation into a determinate one.
Considering ‘recipes’ for the classroom – If students were uniform in background, desires, and aptitudes, recipes might be useful.

7. Tyler
Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction published in 1949
Tyler’s 4 ?s are fundamental to the concept of schooling:
What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?
How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

8. An examination of 3 beliefs
American education costs too much. We spend more on our schools than any other country.
American students are not doing as well as they once did in school; in fact, they know far less than their parents did at the same age.
Our educational position among nations lags far behind our economic competitors.

9. The goal To complicate, not simplify…
Bring an appropriate uncertainty to mind as you think about the functions of education and the forms it can take